Aluminium was a useless novelty because we were unable to manufacture lots of it back then. Something to do with electrolysis requiring lots of electricity, I believe, and there weren't a huge number of electric powerplants operating in 1880.
The Hall-Heroult process did not exist, regardless of powerplants. Aluminum was more expensive than gold because it could only be produced by non-electric vacuum smelting. (While there was not a "huge number" of generators there was enough electric infrastructure in 1880 to support electric cars.) If the HH process existed a decade earlier it would have been used a decade earlier.
Krschultz was being small minded by saying that titanium is expensive, exotic and not useful compared to the cheap metals we have. While forgetting that we didn't always have those metals cheaply.
I was going for sarcasm, but oh well. And you could argue that the HH process would have been invented earlier if electrical powerplants has been invented earlier; the simultaneity of these two historical events is remarkable: the world's first public powerplant opened just 4 years before the discovery of the HH process.
